Beside Rollant, Smitty-Corporal Smitty-also eyed the unicorn-riders, who were tiny in the distance. Smitty said, “If we could push some men across, we could smash up all those sons of bitches.”
“I know. I’ve been thinking the same thing.” Rollant let out a small noise full of longing, the sort of noise a cat on the ground might make at seeing a plump thrush high in a treetop. “The other thing I’ve been thinking is, it wouldn’t be very hard.”
“That’s right. That’s just exactly right. It wouldn’t be hard at all.” Smitty practically quivered with eagerness. “We could head straight on up to the Gulf, and how could the traitors stop us, or even slow us down?”
“They couldn’t. Not a chance.” Rollant was as sure of it as he was of his own name. “We’d be heroes.”
“We’re already heroes. I’ve had a bellyful of being a hero,” Smitty said. “What I want to do is win the gods-damned war and go home.”
“Home.” Rollant spoke the word with enormous longing. For the first time since he’d taken King Avram’s silver and put on the kingdom’s gray tunic and pantaloons, the idea that he would be going home before too long began to seem real. “Why doesn’t Doubting George turn us loose on them?”
“Beats me.” Smitty shrugged. “But you know what? I don’t much care one way or the other.” He waved across the river. “I mean, look at those poor sorry sons of bitches. We’ve licked ’em.” His voice held absolute conviction, absolute certainty. In fact, he said it again: “We’ve licked ’em. They aren’t going to come back and give us trouble, the way they did in Peachtree Province. We could all go home tomorrow, and Ramblerton still wouldn’t have a thing to worry about. You going to tell me I’m wrong?” He looked a challenge at Rollant.
“No,” the blond admitted. “No, I don’t suppose you are.”
“Gods-damned right I’m not,” Smitty said. “And since they are licked, what the hells difference does it make whether we go after ’em hard or not?”
What difference did it make? Any at all? Rollant hadn’t looked at things like that. Now he did. Again, he couldn’t say Smitty was wrong. “What do you think we’ll do, then?” he asked. “Wait here by the river till the war ends in the west? Just stay here and make sure Ned of the Forest doesn’t get loose and make trouble?”
Like most blonds, he had a respect and dread for Ned that amounted almost to superstitious awe. A man who was both a serfcatcher and a first-rate-better than first-rate: brilliant-commander of unicorn-riders, and whose men had been known to slaughter blonds fighting for Avram? No wonder he roused such feelings in the soldiers who had the most reason to oppose him.
Smitty, on the other hand, was an ordinary Detinan. If anything impressed him, he wasn’t inclined to admit it, even to himself. He said, “To the hells with Ned of the Forest, too. He tries getting cute, Hard-Riding Jimmy’ll take care of him.” Smitty spoke with the blithe confidence most ordinary Detinans showed, the blithe confidence that baffled Rollant and other blonds. And, as if to say he didn’t think Ned or the rest of the northerners were worth worrying about, he turned his back on the unicorn-riders and the Franklin River and strode off, whistling.
“Licked.” Rollant tasted the word in his mouth. Could it really be true? He’d thought so during the pursuit, but now that seemed over. Was it still true with him standing here in cold blood? “By the gods, maybe it is,” he murmured. Where Smitty had turned his back on the river, Rollant stared avidly across it. “Licked.” What a lovely word!
He was recalled to his side of the Franklin when somebody spoke to him in a tongue he didn’t understand. Several blond laborers, all plainly escaped serfs, stood there gaping at him in open-mouthed admiration. Some wore the undyed wool tunics and pantaloons Avram’s army issued to such men, others the rags in which they’d run away from their liege lords’ estates.
Such things had happened to him before. Blonds in the north had used a swarm of languages before the Detinan conquerors came. Many still survived, if precariously, and a lot of them had added words to the Detinan spoken in the north. But the speech whose fragments Rollant had learned as a child on Baron Ormerod’s estate in Palmetto Province sounded nothing like this one.
“Talk Detinan,” he told them in that language. It was the conquerors’ tongue, but the only one they had in common. “What do you want?”
They looked disappointed he couldn’t follow them. He’d expected that. One of them, visibly plucking up his courage, asked, “You are really a sergeant, sir?”
“Yes, I’m a sergeant,” Rollant answered. “And you don’t call me sir. You call officers sir. They’re the ones with epaulets.” He saw the blond laborers didn’t know what epaulets were, so he tapped his shoulder. “The fancy ornaments they wear here. You men haven’t been with the army long, have you?”
“No, sir,” another of them said. The laborer who’d spoken first poked him with an elbow. He tried again: “Uh, no, Sergeant.”
Yet another blond asked, “How did you get to be a sergeant, sir?” Force of habit died hard in them. The man added, “How did they let you be a sergeant?”
“They made me a corporal when I took the company standard after the standard-bearer got killed,” Rollant replied. “I charged at the northerners and I was lucky-they didn’t shoot me. Then, when the lieutenant who commanded this company got shot at Ramblerton, they made our sergeant a lieutenant, and they made me a sergeant.”
“A sergeant. A blond sergeant.” The laborer who spoke might have been talking about a black unicorn or some other prodigy of nature.
The blond who’d called to Rollant in the language that wasn’t Detinan asked, “And when you give an order, do the Detinans obey?”
All the blonds leaned forward, eagerly hanging on the answer. They all sighed ecstatically when he nodded. He couldn’t blame them. What blond trapped in serfdom in the north didn’t dream of turning the tables on his liege lord? Rollant knew he had, back when he was bound to Baron Ormerod’s estate outside of Karlsburg.
“They do now,” he told them.
“Now?” They all echoed that. A big, burly blond in rags asked, “Why didn’t they before?”
Rollant wished the man hadn’t asked that question. Reluctantly, he gave back the truth: “Because I had to beat up one of them to convince them I deserved to wear my stripes.”
“Ahhh!” They all said that together, too.
“Wait!” Rollant held up a hand. With desperate urgency, he said, “Do you know what’ll happen if you try to beat up Detinans?” The blond laborers shook their heads. “They’ll give you stripes-stripes on your backs,” he told them. “Or they may nail you to crosses. Don’t try. You can’t get away with it.”
They frowned. The burly one asked, “Why could you, then? That’s not right.”
“Why could I?” Now Rollant was the one doing the echoing. “I’ll tell you why. Because I’ve killed northerners. All the men in my company knew I could do that. They’d seen me do it. They’d seen I could fight and didn’t run away. The only question left was whether I was tough enough to lick them, and I showed them I could do that, too, when one of our Detinans wouldn’t obey me. If you haven’t done all the other things, don’t try this, or you’ll be sorrier than you ever imagined you could be, and no one will help you.”
He wondered if they were really listening, or if one of them would try to hit a Detinan overseer he didn’t like right in the eye. He hoped they wouldn’t be so stupid, but you never could tell.
Maybe they would just try to strip off their colorless clothes and get the Detinans to give them gray tunics and pantaloons instead. They might even succeed; King Avram’s armies seemed permanently hungry for men. But if the blonds expected promotion to be easy or quick, they were doomed to disappointment. It was probably easier for them to end up dead than to end up as corporals, let alone sergeants. Rollant shrugged. Still, if they wanted to try, why shouldn’t they?